Friday, November 16, 2012

German–Spanish correspondence that skips over the English middleman

An English speaker
learning German will note many correspondences and cognates between the
English and German languages. English is, indeed, a member of the
Germanic family of languages.

Likewise, an English speaker learning Spanish will notice many
cognates – mostly different ones – between English and Spanish, due mainly to
the Latin roots of Spanish and the influence of Latin on English.

There are many fewer correspondences between Spanish and German, and
very few that skip over English altogether, but here are three that I’ve
noticed:

German and Spanish use the same word for “heaven” and “sky” (Himmel and cielo, respectively), unlike English.

German and Spanish use the same word for “morning” and “tomorrow” (Morgen and mañana, respectively), unlike English.

This one is a little more complex to explain. A long-running
popular detective show on German TV is called “Tatort,” literally “the
place (Ort) of the deeds (Tat),” but the compound word translates to
“scene of the crime.” “El lugar de los hechos,” in Spanish again would
literally mean “the place of the deeds/events” but the phrase, like the
German compound word, has the connotation of “the scene of the crime.”

Scene of the crime: Escena del crimen en Espanol, if you are translating about a crime,homicide,etc. Lugar de los hechos, would be for telling the sequence of events in an specific area.This is my understanding. You really want to put the background info first. Lugar de los hechos applies to diferent things that happened in an specific place. Scene of the crime refers to an specific place where a crime occured.